MOVIES: Critics’ top picks for 2009

Familiarity reigned in theatres in 2009, as studios once again busied themselves finding “known properties” to lure in audiences. Consequently, fanboys finally got their Watchmen movie, the Star Trek franchise was rebooted, and we can now brace ourselves for endless G.I. Joe sequels. Meanwhile, indie stalwarts Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson revisited their childhoods by bringing beloved children’s books Where the Wild Things Are and Fantastic Mr. Fox to the big screen. And with awards season now upon us, theatres have welcomed more adult-themed literary adaptations such as Precious, The Road, and Up in the Air.

The year also saw moviemakers furthering their infatuation with 3D. Pixar finally took the plunge, continuing its winning streak with the high-flying Up before re-releasing the “classic” Toy Story films reformatted to fit the trend. If James Cameron’s long-gestating, lavishly expensive Avatar opens huge (see review, page 28), you can expect future blockbusters to be more in-your-face than ever before.

Money is tight everywhere in the industry, but film festivals and independent studios and distributors particularly felt the pinch. Consequently, it was harder than ever for small films to establish themselves. Hard, but not impossible.

This year’s Cinderella story was Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, which translated a $15,000 budget and some narrative ingenuity into the most profitable film in history. Paramount, which released it, has announced plans to launch a micro-budget division, a truly heartening development after most major studios shuttered their boutique indie wings earlier this year.

Also reassuring is that, despite the industry’s aversion to risk and originality, singular filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) and the Coen Brothers (A Serious Man) still turned out some of the finest work of their careers. Furthermore, remarkable directorial debuts by Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre) and Duncan Jones (Moon) confirmed that the current challenges couldn’t keep bold new visions from finding their way onto screens.

Your WE movie reviewers have made their year-end lists, checked them twice, and are ready to go on record with their top picks of the year. —Curtis Woloschuk

THE HURT LOCKER
Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Women directors such as Jane Campion (Bright Star) and Lone Scherfig (An Education) shone this year, but Kathryn Bigelow was at the head of the class. Once again exploring a testosterone-heavy, tension-rich environment, Bigelow teamed with imbedded-journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal to deliver the most cogent and compelling depiction of the Iraq war yet.

Bigelow’s masterful film focuses on a Baghdad-stationed U.S. Army bomb squad whose leader, William James (Jeremy Renner, in one of 2009’s breakthrough performances), has 40 days left in his tour of duty. Rapt viewers watch with white knuckles and bated breath as James throws caution to the wind to deactivate explosives, endure desert shoot-outs, and lead raids on insurgent strongholds.

Collaborating with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, Bigelow employs fiercely kinetic, vérité-style camerawork to immerse the audience into the ubiquitous peril experienced by James and his colleagues. (Congratulations to any viewer who is capable of escaping the film’s harrowing opening sequence without needing to reapply their antiperspirant.) Perhaps even more impressively, the frenetic film also finds Bigelow and Boal investigating the cracked psyches of these adrenaline-junkie soldiers. As a result, we come to understand how deciding on a breakfast cereal could prove more daunting for James than diffusing an improvised explosive device.

“War is a drug,” asserts The Hurt Locker’s opening quote. Through the course of its enthralling running time, Bigelow’s tour-de-force effort allows us to not only experience the intoxicating highs of battle, but also the withdrawal experienced by those incapable of coping without the mayhem. —CW

DISTRICT 9
Starring Sharlto Copley
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
This year has been a spectacular one for science fiction. J.J. Abrams jump-started an ailing franchise with his kick-ass re-envisioning of Star Trek; the psychological aspects of sci-fi classics like 2001 were front and centre in Moon (which also proved you didn’t need CGI or a huge budget to be engaging); and then there was District 9.

When Peter Jackson advised first-time director Neill Blomkamp that his short about a stranded spaceship had the makings of a feature, the result was one of the smartest sci-fi flicks to ever hit the big screen. A powerful allegory for the social and economic problems of illegal immigration and segregation, it also takes a swipe at the war on terror and corporate malfeasance.

Sociology not your thing? Wait, there’s more! Blomkamp seamlessly blends archival news footage with staged broadcasts and live action. Until the first alien comes into view, you might think you’re watching a documentary.

Not a doc fan? No problem. Once the lead character begins his messy transformation into an alien, Blomkamp slams the action into hyperdrive, breaks out the heavy artillery, blows things up, and sprays the screen with buckets of human and alien viscera.

Mayhem not your thing? Well, the special effects were done right here in Vancouver, and Blomkamp is now a transplanted Vancouverite who will doubtless have a long-lasting, positive effect on the local economy (take that, Olympics!). Think galactically and watch locally: You will not be disappointed. —Greg Ursic

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel
Directed by Marc Webb
For far too long, the romantic comedy’s meagre appeal to male audiences comprised of casting sexy female leads and stand-up-comic side characters, and inserting crass, low-brow humour into the same frustratingly familiar plot formulas. Then came Marc Webb.

Music video director Webb’s cinematic debut is, in a commendable display of gumption, an honest, inventive, and hilarious emotional roller coaster that toys with the genre, enhances its capacity, and appeals equally — if not more — to a Y-chromosome audience.

Starring two of this generation’s most exciting budding talents, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, (500) Days of Summer is a story about perceptions and illusions, and love’s ability to tinker cruelly with both. Noticeably absent are traditional rom-com crutches like cheap gags, celebrity cameos, and fairytale endings. Refreshingly, Webb’s film has more in common with Annie Hall than anything Judd Apatow has been attached to.

The film jumps playfully back and forth along the 500-day timeline of Tom (Gordon Levitt) and Summer’s (Deschanel) relationship, portrayed through Tom’s frequently skewed perspective. One minute they’re fighting over pancakes, the next they’re playing house on an Ikea date. Webb explores infatuated Tom’s tendency to colour select memories and bury others, sometimes revisiting scenes under fresh light, using a non-linear structure so effective it could make Tarantino blush.

And if that weren’t enough, the film’s gorgeous, picturesque cinematography and pitch-perfect soundtrack — featuring Regina Spektor, the Temper Trap, Doves, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Smiths — surely cements (500) Days of Summer’s place among the most heartfelt, funny, and valuable movies about dating to come out of the aughts. —Andrew Weichel

STAR TREK
Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto
Directed by JJ Abrams
The teaser for Star Trek was simple: the hull of the Enterprise NCC-1701 slides by slowly, almost sexily. I sat with my mouth agape, heart pounding. I had only one thought, and another Trekkie somewhere in the theatre voiced it: “Oh, no.”

We were bracing for an attack. Hollywood — albeit J.J. Abrams’s delightfully weird version of it —was reclaiming our beloved franchise. Who knew what might manifest at the other end of such an unforgiving wormhole?

We needn’t have worried, for the final product was exactly what that teaser hinted at: pure Trek sex. Abrams, with the help of a team of experts, had done something improbable. In a threesome between himself, the casual moviegoer, and the Trekkie, he pleased us all. For the earthbound, there was ferocious action, scurrilous baddies (Romulans!), and a bit of T&A;. But by making the sex object green, Abrams also winked to the devotees. See also: Captain Pike’s wheelchair, Tiberius, the highly logical bullying of juvie Vulcans, Chris Pine swaggering onto the bridge and saying “Bones!” in perfect Shatner-esque cadence, Bones himself (the pitch-perfect Karl Urban), and the beatific Nimoy, still Spock-on after decades. Sigh.

At the annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas this past summer, attendance was up, and talk of a whole new generation of fans abounded. In one forum, a young humanoid stood up. She was Trekkie deluxe, awkward and gawky. “I used to get teased a lot, but after the movie came out, people said, ‘I get it. I get why you like this.’” Nerds and regulars, coming together? It’s a veritable Roddenberry wet dream. —Kaitlin Fontana

UP IN THE AIR
Starring George Clooney, Anna Kendrick
Directed by Jason Reitman
George Clooney’s confident smirk and sexy swagger can sell almost any movie. By the knocking of my knees, did he work it in 2009! He had starring roles in The Men Who Stare at Goats and Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it’s his turn as a frequent-flying axe-man in Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air where he truly soars.

Clooney’s Ryan Bingham spends over 300 days a year jetting between various U.S. cities, paid by cowardly corporations to downsize their employees. Ryan’s also a wannabe motivational speaker, having perfected a lengthy riff about the ways in which human attachments weigh us down.

Of course, a solitary man obsessed with the manufactured loyalty of frequent-flyer programs is subconsciously looking for people to kick down the door of his detachment. Cue the sexy Alex (the winning Vera Farmiga), a female version of Ryan; and Natalie (a superb Anna Kendrick), Ryan’s tightly-wound, recently graduated protégée. The casting is perfect: Clooney and Farmiga fit together seamlessly, and Twilight backbencher Kendrick sparkles opposite these two heavyweights.

That said, what makes Up in the Air one of the year’s best is its timing. Filmed two years ago, when everyone was trying to scramble down from the precipice of economic collapse, the movie feels eerily prescient. Reitman’s been faulted by some critics for “exploiting” real people recently laid off from their jobs in scenes throughout the film, but in capturing the current global desperation felt by millions of people who are now jobless, and dressing it up with extraordinary performances, we’re reminded just how relevant movies can be. —Andrea Warner

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
Starring Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Part comic book, part WWII buddy flick, and part spaghetti western, Inglourious Basterds is pure Tarantino: pastiche masquerading as art. (Or is that art masquerading as pastiche?)

In typical Tarantino style, Basterds is a tangled web of characters and side ventures, loosely gathered here around a unit of Nazi-hunting Jewish-American soldiers looking for the chance to kill Hitler. Already a master of the symbiosis between character and casting, Tarantino outdoes himself in Basterds. Brad Pitt’s over-the-top but charismatic portrayal of Basterds leader Lt. Aldo Raine plays perfectly off torture-porn director Eli Roth as the baseball-bat-wielding “Bear Jew.” But these big names pale next to performances by relative unknowns like French actress Mélanie Laurent as a vengeful Jewish woman, and Austria’s Christoph Waltz, whose Col. Hans Landa might well be the most unctuous and calmly threatening film villain of all time.

For Basterds, Tarantino, the notorious perfectionist, abandoned his meticulous nature in deference to a shortened shooting schedule and the chance to premiere his film at Cannes. Lost was some of the obsessive contemplation and quirkiness that has lent all of his previous films a sort of grotesque preciousness. Gained was a nearly intangible freedom: a lightness and a sense of unfettered fun.

While it borrows heavily from the structure of his previous efforts, Basterds is also unlike any Tarantino film that came before it. The trademark winking humour and braggadocio are still very much at the surface, but they sugar-coat what is, at times, pure genius, and at others, a work of frustratingly oh-so-close near-genius. That unapologetic lack of perfection makes Inglourious Basterds greater than the sum of its parts. —Steven Schelling